Posts tagged "photography" - nolan caudill's internet house

A Tahoe Trip

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 08:00:00 +0000

Meghan and I got back from Lake Tahoe this afternoon. We shared a house in Incline Village, Nevada with her parents and three brothers who had flown out from Tennessee. It was a relaxing week of eating, drinking, skiing, reading, and catching up with the in-laws.

A Little Trip to the Big Island

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:00:00 +0000

I finally developed about 9 rolls of film from the trip to Hawaii Meghan and I took back in September. I’ve included a few of my favorites and the rest are here.

They Used to Pour Fire off a Mountaintop

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

I was on a wiki walk when I came across this fascinating, but long gone, summertime event that used to happen inside Yosemite. So, they used to pour still-burning embers off the top of Glacier Point at nightfall every day during the summer to make, what they called, a “firefall.” This image is from Flickr user Cliff Stone (his real name!) taken in the summer of 1962 before the event was banned. The firefall began when people down in the valley would see the embers from the nightly bonfire from the Glacier Point Mountain House kicked off the cliff’s face and then people would start specifically asking for it to happen, as seeing a river of fire coming down the face of cliff was quite the spectacle. There were various attempts to stop the firefall between its inception in 1872 until its demise in 1968, mainly citing the crushing traffic of the sightseers and the fact that it was a man-made event in a setting that the rangers wanted to be celebrated for its natural beauty. Even President John F. Kennedy saw it one night on a visit to the park while in office, but as he had to finish a phone call, they delayed it from its usual time of 9pm to 9:30pm. The ritual usually kicked off at 9pm with a call-and-response, with someone in the valley yelling, “Let the fire fall!” with the response from the top of the mountain with, “The fire falls!” There are so many things I enjoy about this. Don’t get me wrong, if they tried to start this again, I’d be first in line to protest, but in retrospect of it actually happening, it’s fascinating. I can almost see the kitschy 1950s postcard saying “Come see the great Yosemite Firefall!” and the hordes of middle America in their station wagons parked on the road at nightfall. And it’s so audacious to think that that they used to allow a hotel to dump burning embers off the top of a mountain, especially when park rangers will definitely ticket you in most national parks for having even small campfires. Now, people come to see a natural version of this, when the late winter February sun strikes Horsetail Falls just right, and sets the flowing water seemingly aflame. I’d like to see this one day and, in a small way, I’m sad I’ll never get to hear the people yelling and then pouring fire off the high peak, purely for amusement.

Photos from our Trip to Wine Country

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Meghan and I went to Napa Valley with her parents this Monday and Tuesday, staying at a vineyard and visiting several wineries for special tastings.

It was one of those special trips where we received VIP status everywhere we went, which I’m not used to, but it was fun. The trip also culminated with dinner at the French Laundry last night which was incredible.

I’m going to try to write a few more words about the trip, but today was a hard hit back to the reality of the work week, with meetings, meetings, and meetings, so I’m hitting the sack early tonight. I just wanted to get these photos up before I did.

These are all from my Ricoh GR III and I haven’t shot with a digital camera (besides my phone) in several months so it was interesting trying to tell my eyes and fingers to do the right thing. This was also the first time I’ve ever shot in RAW, so I also had to do some minimal post-processing.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=109615

Look at these people

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Aren’t they just great?

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=109615

Things Around My House

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

No matter how insignificant a photo seems at the time I took it, I’ve never regretted taking any of the ones that captured genuine moments.

It’s these little moments that I’m not good at taking when I’m carrying my film camera. When I’m physically limited to a small number of shots, I’m more reluctant to take shots of “minor” things.

I upload all my photos to Flickr (obviously) and on Flickr, I suffer from multiple personalities.

There’s me trying to be a more serious photographer, where the aesthetic often matters more than the subject matter. There’s me also hanging out with my friends, trying to remember what we had for dinner, or what Meghan was wearing on a date night. For these, I care so much immensely more about what I’m taking a picture of instead of if all the “good” photography stuff applies. (If I was a better photographer, I might not have that problem and every photo turns out decent. But I’m not, so I do.)

Like many humans, vanity is one of my (many) character flaws. I want to be seen as intelligent and creative, and I can convince myself that I’d rather put my own memories in the backseat, so that I can be seen as a decent photographer, and thus, only upload the 4 or 5 decent shots from a roll of a film that I took several weeks or months ago.

And I realize that I’ve been missing a lot. There’s something magical about being at a party taking photos, and then waking up the next morning to comments, faves, and seeing the same scene from different point-of-view from your friends’ cameras.

The bigger point I’ve missed is this: what’s important at the moment of capture, from the point-of-view of the photographer, is not a great measure of what’s important throughout the entire lifetime of the photo. Each photo is viewed through many prisms of different people’s experiences and it’s a stretch to think one knows that it won’t be significant to someone (and probably yourself) later. I’d rather not miss out on the part of a story that one photo could be telling, especially when I don’t know where the plot is heading.

So I’ve started using my iPhone and Instagram a lot, which brings me back to the title of the post. Yesterday morning, I went through and just took pictures of things around my house, insignificant things, things I wouldn’t normally upload to Flickr. And you know what? It was fun. The Instagram filters put enough “smudge” on the photos, that they don’t necessarily look like they came from a phone and most of the time, that’s good enough for creating a visually compelling photo.

And I can still upload the nicer film shots. I still enjoy shots that are more artistically composed but it’s a different kind of a pleasure given than the small snaps with my phone that I immediately upload.

Is this a fault of Flickr and other online photosharing sites to not embrace these multiple personalities? Possibly. More fine-grained sharing controls could be used, like Google+’s Circles, but, to me, those systems aren’t fun. I hate compartmentalizing and labeling every aspect of my life, and while this can guarantee proper sharing controls, it sucks out all the organic, fuzzy fun like we have in the Real Life, that it is supposedly representing.

Instagram on Flickr

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

About 5.5 million public Instagram photos on Flickr.

Shutters and Apertures

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Through college, I used a little Canon PowerShot that more or less had an on-and-off switch and handled all the messy details of focusing and metering for me. For capturing events, it worked, but there was nothing timeless or intriguing about the images I took. A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn what made a photograph “good” and my first step was learning how cameras worked. I’m not really comfortable with “magic” in most forms, so my wife snagged a decades-old Minolta X-370 off Craigslist for a few bucks from a guy with whiskey on his breath at a time of day when that sort of thing is worrisome. This kind of camera gives you full control over aperture size and shutter speed, and while it does have a built-in meter, it forces you to think about how light is hitting the film and adjust things to get the aesthetic you want. The X-370, for me, was a great first “real” camera and I still shoot with it occasionally. It shoots in aperture-priority mode, meaning that all I control is how big the aperture opens and the camera adjusts the shutter accordingly. Aperture is how you control your depth-of-field, meaning if you want the nice effect of not having everything in equally sharp focus, you can make the aperture larger. My little Canon gave me little access to the aperture and thus my pictures were all sharply in focus at all depths, so the person’s face 6 feet away was just as sharp as the tree a few hundred feet behind him. For some shots, this worked fine but sometimes you wanted to pull your subject away from a busy background or draw attention to something in frame by just using the depth of field. With controlling just the aperture, I could choose which effect I wanted and with this one change, I started liking my pictures more. My current daily shooter is a Canonet QL17 G-III which is a shutter-priority rangefinder. This means I tell the camera how fast to run the shutter and it figures out how big to make the aperture, so a faster shutter means less light hitting the film which means the aperture needs to be open wider for a proper exposure. Shutter speed is another major way to control the aesthetic of an image. An oft-shot image using shutter styling is where someone shoots a river but slows down the shutter speed enough to make the flowing water seem more “fuzzy” than sharp. With fast-moving water, you capture more of the movement of the water instead of how it looks at one instant in time. Shooting a baseball player in the middle of a swing will be two complete different pictures if you have a fast shutter speed versus a slow shutter speed. For me, I seldom take photographs where I try to play with getting movement on film so I still use my shutter-priority camera like an aperture-based one, adjusting the shutter speed until I get the aperture size I want. The above photograph was taken with the aperture somewhere between f/8 and f/11, if I remember correctly. It was a really sunny day and I wanted to get the people exposed as well as I could while still getting everything in focus, but with the direct sunlight, I couldn’t point and click without completely underexposing the people, rendering them as dark silhouettes. So, I filled my frame with people in the foreground, and adjusted the shutter speed until I got a small enough aperture for the depth-of-field I wanted, and I then set this aperture manually, overriding the automatic mode. I then framed the whole scene including the sun, fairly confident that most of the people wouldn’t be underexposed. This picture of Meghan getting ready in the morning uses a shallow depth-of-field to draw the eye to her reflection as the most important thing in the image. I sped the shutter speed up as much as possible to make the aperture open as much as I could, knowing that if I focused on her reflection, it would be sharply focused while her actual body would not be as sharp. I took this picture of Trevor and Bert at a good Japanese restaurant near Union Square. In this image, I noticed that the menus and posters on the back wall were fairly noisy and if I shot anything smaller than f/4 or f/5.6, these posters would be sharply focused and would clutter the scene. Speeding the shutter up as much as I could in this underlit restaurant opened the aperture up wide, which put the guys in sharp focus while fading out what was in the background. To play with this yourself if you have a digital camera, put your camera in something like Program mode which will choose a “best” shutter-and-aperture combination but lets you change each independently while keeping it exposed properly. This way you can see exactly the effect that shutter speed and aperture size have on the final image.

New photos

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000

After sitting on a few rolls of film for the past few months, I finally got them developed.

Check them out here.

First photos with the new camera

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:00:00 +0000